“Higher” or “better” can only mean containing more pleasure.  To speak of “better pleasures” in any other sense is to make the goodness of the sole good as an end depend upon something which, ex hypothesi, is not good as an end.  Mill is as one who, having set up sweetness as the sole good quality in jam, prefers Tiptree to Crosse and Blackwell, not because it is sweeter, but because it possesses a better kind of sweetness.  To do so is to discard sweetness as an ultimate criterion and to set up something else in its place.  So, when Mill, like everyone else, speaks of “better” or “higher” or “superior” pleasures, he discards pleasure as an ultimate criterion, and thereby admits that pleasure is not the sole good.  He feels that some pleasures are better than others, and determines their respective values by the degree in which they possess that quality which all recognise but none can define—­goodness.  By higher and lower, superior and inferior pleasures we mean simply more good and less good pleasures.  There are, therefore, two different qualities, Pleasantness and Goodness.  Pleasure, amongst other things, may be good; but pleasure cannot mean good.  By “good” we cannot mean “pleasureable;” for, as we see, there is a quality, “goodness,” so distinct from pleasure that we speak of pleasures that are more or less good without meaning pleasures that are more or less pleasant.  By “good,” then, we do not mean “pleasure,” neither is pleasure the sole good.

Mr. Moore goes on to inquire what things are good in themselves, as ends that is to say.  He comes to a conclusion with which we all agree, but for which few could have found convincing and logical arguments:  “states of mind,” he shows, alone are good as ends.[9] People who have very little taste for logic will find a simple and satisfactory proof of this conclusion afforded by what is called “the method of isolation.”

That which is good as an end will retain some, at any rate, of its value in complete isolation:  it will retain all its value as an end.  That which is good as a means only will lose all its value in isolation.  That which is good as an end will remain valuable even when deprived of all its consequences and left with nothing but bare existence.  Therefore, we can discover whether honestly we feel some thing to be good as an end, if only we can conceive it in complete isolation, and be sure that so isolated it remains valuable.  Bread is good.  Is bread good as an end or as a means?  Conceive a loaf existing in an uninhabited and uninhabitable planet.  Does it seem to lose its value?  That is a little too easy.  The physical universe appears to most people immensely good, for towards nature they feel violently that emotional reaction which brings to the lips the epithet “good”; but if the physical universe were not related to mind, if it were never to provoke an emotional reaction, if no mind were ever to be affected by it, and if it had no mind of its own, would it still appear good?  There are